Vivi Ann noticed every change. For years, it seemed, she’d taken all that for granted, seen each alteration in the seasons as nothing more than the passing of time.
Her pregnancy had changed her perspective. Now she marked time in the smallest increments—a day, a week, sometimes even an hour. It wasn’t just her body that was changing, either. Everything felt different lately. She had never been as excited for anything as she was for the arrival of this baby. She was equally terrified. On a daily basis she missed her mother, and not in the ephemeral, little-girl way that she’d always missed her. That ache had turned into a hot, sharp pain. She had so many questions and no way to get the answers she needed.
Her fear—a new thing—ran deep and dark. At night, when she lay in bed with Dallas, listening to him sleep, she worried that she was too selfish to be a good mother, too immature to guide another human being through life. She worried, too, about his or her Native American heritage and how she would help her child to feel accepted by both worlds. In the ten months since her marriage, she’d learned very little about the man she loved. He loved her—that was obvious—but the rest of his emotions he kept in close check. Anger was the only thing that sometimes came to the surface, and on the rare occasions when she saw that side of him, she was afraid.
Remember,
he’d told her once when they were fighting,
abuse can make an animal mean
.
I tried to warn you
. He’d wanted to push her away; she saw that now. The only thing in the world that scared him was their love.
He didn’t understand, really, that she didn’t just love him. She lived for him. He was still the addiction she couldn’t shake.
“You’re zoning out again,” Aurora said, taking a french fry from Vivi Ann’s plate. “Hot sex this morning?”
Vivi Ann laughed, and rubbed her swollen belly. “You were the one who told me that passion faded.”
“Yeah, well. Then you met Tattoo Boy.”
“I can’t believe how much I love him. You know that, right?”
“The surprising thing is how much he seems to love you. He watches you like a hawk. Sometimes I think he can’t stand to be away from you.”
Vivi Ann heard the wistfulness in her sister’s voice, and realized how familiar that tone had become. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Richard. What’s wrong?”
Aurora’s well-made-up face crumpled at that. “I thought I was hiding it.”
“That must be lonely.”
Aurora’s eyes filled with tears. “I like him. And he likes me. Maybe that’s okay, enough. But I’ve seen what you and Dallas have and now I don’t know. Should I just . . . walk through life? And there are the kids to think about. I don’t want them to grow up like we did, with this hole in the family where someone should be.”
Vivi Ann reached across the table and laid her hand on top of Aurora’s. “Everyone thinks Winona’s the smart one of us, but it’s you, Aurora. You . . . see things, you pay attention. You’ll make the right choice.”
“Maybe I don’t want to choose.”
Vivi Ann knew all too well how seductive that idea was. “Not doing anything is a choice, too. Not a good one. Trust me. Winona’s still pissed at me for hurting Luke. And she’s right. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been purposely cruel.”
“No one can hold a grudge like Winona, that’s for sure.”
“Sometimes I think she hates me.”
“Believe me, Vivi, the person Winona hates is herself. She’s spent her whole life trying to get blood from a stone and because she doesn’t know how to give up, she can’t stop. She keeps waiting for something from Dad that she’ll never get.”
“That’s because she needs words, and he can’t do that.”
Aurora sighed. “Vivi, you have a different dad than I do, that’s all I can say. To you, he’s like one of those horses you rescue.”
“He
is
like that, Aurora. He loves us.”
“If he does, Vivi, it’s a pathetic, watered-down version, and God help any of us if we ever need him to show it.”
“I saw him cry once,” Vivi Ann said. It was a memory she’d never been able to share before.
“Dad?”
“That last night, when Mom’s hospital bed was in the living room and we slept in sleeping bags on the floor.”
Aurora’s smile was unsteady. “She wanted us with her.”
Vivi Ann nodded. “I woke up in the middle of the night and saw Dad sitting by her bed. Mom said, ‘Take care of my garden, Henry. Love them, for me,’ and he wiped his eyes.”
My garden
. The fragile moment bound them; they were Bean and Sprout again, a pair of little girls sitting at the kitchen table with their mom, making seashell-encrusted Kleenex boxes for the bathroom.
“What did you say to Dad?”
“Nothing. I pretended not to be awake. And when I woke up again, she was gone.”
“It could have been dust in his eyes.”
“It wasn’t.”
Aurora sat back.
Vivi Ann looked down at her swollen belly. “I miss her lately all the time. I want to—” She gasped in surprise as a cramp squeezed her abdomen. Hard. She had just gotten her breath back when another one hit; this one hurt even more.
“Are you okay?” Aurora asked, leaning forward.
“No,” Vivi Ann gasped. “It’s too early . . .”
Vivi Ann had never been one of those people who thought about the bad things that could happen in life. When she heard people say,
Life can turn on a dime,
she usually smiled and thought:
Yes. It can always get better.
On the rare occasions when morbid thoughts did cross her mind, she pushed them away quickly and focused on something else. She’d learned early on that optimism was a choice. When asked about the buoyancy of her outlook she replied jauntily that good things happened to good people, and she believed it.
Now she knew why people often frowned at that answer. They knew what she had not yet learned: Optimism was not only naïve. Often it could be cruel.
Bad things did happen, even when you did everything right. You could get married when you fell in love, conceive a child in the bed of that love, give up every habit that endangered your child, and still give birth six weeks early.
“Can I get you anything else?”
Vivi Ann roused herself enough to open her eyes. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been lying here with her eyes closed, replaying it all in her head. “Have Dad and Win come by yet?”
Aurora stood by her bed, looking sad. In the last few hours her sister’s poufed-out bangs had fallen flat across her face and her makeup had faded. Without all that, Aurora looked thin and worn-out. “Not yet.”
Vivi Ann smiled as best she could. “It means a lot that you’ve been here for all of this, Aurora. I forgive you for stealing my birthday tiara.”
Aurora brushed the still-damp hair away from Vivi Ann’s face. “I never stole your stupid tiara. You’re the princess in the family.”
“I wish they’d let me see him again. He’s so tiny.” That last word broke a piece of her control away; fear rushed through the crack. She reached over to the bedside table and picked up the pretty pink scallop shell she’d kept in her purse for years. It was as close to her mother as she could get.
“Don’t go down that road,” Aurora said. “You’re a mom now. He needs you to be strong for him.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Of course you’re afraid. That’s what parenting is. From now on you’ll always be a little afraid.”
“Couldn’t you lie to me? Tell me it’s a bed of roses?” Vivi Ann closed her eyes, sighing tiredly.
All this honesty was crippling. The truth kept banging around in her head:
thirty-four weeks . . . undeveloped lungs . . . complications . . . we’ll see if he makes it through the night
.
She heard the doorknob turn and opened her eyes. Had she fallen asleep? For how long? She looked around the room for Aurora or Dallas, but they were gone. The room was empty. They’d given her a private room, which would have been great if she didn’t know why. They wouldn’t put her in a room with another new mother because Vivi Ann’s son might not make it. She knew this without being told.
Then Winona and Daddy walked into the room. Vivi Ann felt tears well in her eyes. The fear she’d been holding back spilled over when she looked at Winona. No matter what had happened between them, Win was still her big sister, her mom in a way, the one who always made things right. Vivi Ann hadn’t realized until this moment how much she’d needed her. “Have you seen him, Win?”
Winona nodded, coming over to the bed. “He’s beautiful, Vivi.”
Dad’s big, rough hands curled around the bed’s metal rails, looking like old roots against the shiny metal. Up close she could see how hollow his face looked; how tightly he was controlling his emotions.
It was a look she’d seen on his face all her life, or at least since Mom’s death. “Hey, Daddy,” she said, hearing a catch in her voice.
The change on his face was as subtle as cold butter turning soft around the edges on a warm day, but in it, she saw everything that mattered. It was how he used to look at her, back when she was his favorite little girl who could do no wrong, and he was the ground beneath her feet. Winona would have wanted words to go with that look, and Aurora wouldn’t have noticed the change at all, but Vivi Ann knew what it meant: he loved her. And it was enough.
“He’s too small,” she said, starting to cry. “They say he might not make it.”
“Don’t cry,” Winona said, but she was crying, too.
“He’ll make it,” Dad said, and his voice was firm now, the voice of her youth, gone in the years since Mom’s death and suddenly back. It reminded her in a painful flash of who they all had been with Mom between them.
“How can you be so sure?”
“He’s a Grey, ain’t he?”
Vivi Ann smiled at that. A Grey. There were generations of strength behind that name. “Yeah,” she said quietly, feeling hopeful for the first time.
It meant so much to Vivi Ann that they were here, that even after all that had happened, they were a family. She talked for a while and then closed her eyes just for a minute. When she opened her eyes again, the room was dark and they were gone.
She hit the bed control and angled up to a seated position. Shadows darkened the room, but a shaft of moonlight came through the window, illuminating her husband, who lay slumped in an uncomfortable plastic chair. In the ethereal, uncertain light, it took her a moment to see his face.
“Oh, Dallas,” she said.
He got up slowly and walked toward her, pushing a hand through his long hair as he moved. “You should see the other guy.”
At her bedside, he stopped.
She was glad for the shadows suddenly, wished it were even darker in here. As it was, the contrast of pale light and shadow only highlighted the damage: his cheeks were pale and hollow but for the dark, bloody gash right above the bone; one eye was swollen shut and looked to be a sick, yellowing color. He lifted his right hand, showing her his battered knuckles, how caked they were by dried, black blood.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“Cat’s.”
“Who started the fight?”
“I did.”
Vivi Ann looked in her husband’s eyes, and saw how damaged he’d been by his father, and how scared he was about being a father himself. There was so much about him she didn’t understand, like what you were left with after being beaten with electrical cords or locked in a dark closet or after watching your father murder your mother. But she knew about going on, and she knew about love. “Aurora tells me that from now on we’ll always be afraid. Apparently it’s part of parenting.”
Dallas said nothing to that, just stared down at her as if he were waiting for something.
“You can’t go beating people up every time you’re scared; I guess that’s my point.”
“What if I’m not up to this?”
“You are.”
“Lots of people . . . cops, judges, shrinks . . . they said I was like my dad. Ask Winona. She dug up my record, and she’s right about one thing: it isn’t pretty.”
It was the clearest picture of his past she’d ever gotten: she imagined him as a young boy, abused for a long time and then suddenly alone in the world, being told by adults that he was bad to the bone.
Abuse can make an animal mean
. Had they dared to say that to a little boy who’d been hurt?
She reached up, gently touched his wounded cheek. “You love me, Dallas. That’s how you’re different from him.”
It was a long time before he nodded, and even then, he didn’t smile.
“So no more beating up strangers because you’re scared, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now take me to see our son. I’ve been waiting all day for you.”
He helped her into a wheelchair and tucked a blanket around her, then rolled her down to the neonatal intensive care unit. There, they spoke to the night nurse, who made an exception to the rules and showed them to the tiny incubator where their son lay sleeping.
Emotions overwhelmed Vivi Ann. Love. Terror. Grief. Hope. Joy. Love most of all. She thought she was too full to feel anything else, but then she looked up at Dallas.
“My grandfather’s name was Noah,” he said quietly.
“Noah Grey Raintree,” she said, nodding at the sound of it.
“I didn’t know it would feel like this,” Dallas whispered. “If anything happens to him . . .” He didn’t finish the thought and Vivi Ann didn’t try to help him.
There was nothing to say. She reached out for her husband’s hand, hoping together they could find the kind of hope that once she’d taken for granted.
On the fifteenth of July, people began showing up at Water’s Edge, uninvited. Each person came with a specific task to do. The 4-H chapter cleaned out the horses’ stalls; the Future Farmers of America helped Henry feed the steers; the Women’s Equestrian Drill Team took over Vivi Ann’s lessons. The word had gone out last week: Noah was coming home at last. And the town rallied to help out Vivi Ann.
She was stunned by her neighbors’ help and grateful for their prayers. In the last six weeks, she and Dallas had been living separate lives, making sure that one of them was always at the hospital. Although she hadn’t told people how difficult it had been, obviously they knew.